Passing Judgment
Judge someone else and you end up judging yourself. That lands a little strange when you sit with it. Does it change how you behave? Because when you say something about another person, you put yourself on display, right there in the open. You give away more than you realize. The easy part is watching other people do it and noticing how much it tells you about them, including the faults they probably think they keep hidden.
The uncomfortable part is what it says about me. That alone is reason enough to pause before the words come out. Lately the word I keep reaching for is narcissistic, and now I have to turn it on myself. Every one of us carries some version of this: a bit of self-focus, a sense that we matter, a wish to be seen as something more than another face in the crowd. The word isn't flattering. So why does it keep coming up?
When I use it, I mean someone who has turned so far inward that no one else registers. Me, me, me. If an action serves me, then it's fine by definition. There's a second piece to it too: a self-confidence that tips into delusion, the belief that you can do whatever you want and walk away clean even when you can't. That belief breeds reckless mistakes, the kind that wreck the very thing the person set out to accomplish. Other people stop being people. They become obstacles or tools, which is how someone talks themselves into behavior that should be unthinkable. The true-crime book 'Murder in Little Egypt' walks through exactly that kind of thinking. At the far end of it, the person no longer recognizes anyone else as a human being on equal footing with himself.
So before you open your mouth about someone else, stop. Ask what the comment reveals about you.